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Transportation

Americans have always been a people on the move—on rails, roads, and waterways (for travel through the air, visit the National Air and Space Museum). In the transportation collections, railroad objects range from tools, tracks, and many train models to the massive 1401, a 280-ton locomotive built in 1926. Road vehicles include coaches, buggies, wagons, trucks, motorcycles, bicycles, and automobiles—from the days before the Model T to modern race cars. The accessories of travel are part of the collections, too, from streetlights, gas pumps, and traffic signals to goggles and overcoats.

In the maritime collections, more than 7,000 design plans and scores of ship models show the evolution of sailing ships and other vessels. Other items range from scrimshaw, photographs, and marine paintings to life jackets from the Titanic.

The capstan, most commonly found on the decks of early steamboats, was used as a vertical winch for raising or lowering anchors, hoisting sails and cargo, hauling heavy lines, or other jobs where individual manpower was not enough.

It was operated manually, by putting timbers into the holes and using the resulting leverage to wind a line wrapped around the center of the device more easily. Sea chanties, or rhythmic songs, were often employed by ship crews to ensure that everyone hauled at the same time. Later in the 19th century, steam capstans and donkey engines replaced human muscle on the larger vessels.

After the whale skin and attached fat, together called blubber, was hauled aboard the mother ship for processing in large strips, it was chopped into small pieces with different tools to expose more surface area to the melting heat of the boiling oil in the try-pot. This chopper was one of those tools.

These hand tools were found in the engine and boiler space belowdecks in Indiana’s hold, indicating that they were used for the machinery. The crew used the shovel to add coal to the fires.

The hand truck—virtually identical to modern examples—is one of four found aboard Indiana and used for moving cargo into, out of, and around the cargo hold of the ship. This hand truck was the artifact that actually identified the vessel when it was located in 1972, for the words “PROPR INDIANA” were stamped into its handle. The other three had different ships’ names stamped on them, indicating that they were secondhand or borrowed equipment.

Very little is known of Lewis Temple's early life. Born around 1800 to slave parents in Richmond, Virginia , by 1829 he had moved to New Bedford, Massachusetts, where he married. By 1836, he had a blacksmith shop on a local wharf, where he made shipsmithing items like spikes, harpoons, rigging elements, cargo hooks, barrel hoop and other iron ship fittings.

Temple developed a simple but significant refinement to the harppon: the so-called Temple toggle iron or gig. This feature at the tip of a harpoon offered a more secure way to hook into a whale. Unfortunately, Temple never patented his idea, which swiftly achieved widespread application throughout the world's whale fisheries. He died in May 1854, unrecognized and in debt.

While Lewis Temple did not invent the toggle, his invention made it better. The first barb at the tip of the dart was designed to penetrate the whale's flesh, and the second barb also went straight in. A small wooden peg holding the lower barb in place would then break when the whale pulled away, allowing the barbed head to swivel away from the shaft. The new T-shape of the barb prevented the dart from pulling out of its wound.

This long-handled, iron basket, called a torch or fire basket, was used to help 19th century river pilots navigate in shallow waters at night. Filled with burning fuel and suspended off the side of a steamboat, the torch basket illuminated the shoreline, as well as snags or debris in the water that could damage the vessel. Steamboat crew also used torch baskets for lighting up the ship’s deck, the landing, or a levee during deliveries of cargo after dark.

Although the torch basket was invaluable for steamboats operating at night, the device sometimes proved disastrous. Typically the fuel consisted of oil-soaked scraps and "lightwood" or Southern pine covered in resinous sap, which could easily send off sparks. So as not to obstruct the light, these buckets of flames rarely had any sort of protective covering. But because steamboats were often loaded with highly flammable cargoes, such as cotton and lumber, it is not surprising that one stray spark could destroy an entire vessel. That may have been the fate for this torch basket, which was found by a net fisherman near Clinton, Iowa. It was pulled up from 30 feet of water in the Mississippi River.

By the early 20th century, torch baskets were becoming obsolete, replaced by electric lamps and incandescent light bulbs used to illuminate steamboats as well as the landings they served. Although the phasing-out of the torch basket lowered the risk of steamboat fires, some steamboat enthusiasts lamented the lost romance of waterways flickering with flame.

Abraham Lincoln had considerable maritime background, although it is usually eclipsed by his political heritage. At the age of 19 in Anderson Creek, Ind., he built a flatboat for $24, loaded it with a local farmer’s produce, and floated it 1,000 miles down the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers to New Orleans, where he sold both the boat and its cargo. When he was 22, he was hired by an Illinois store owner to take some goods down the Mississippi and sell them in New Orleans. Lincoln built another flatboat and successfully piloted it from New Salem, Ill. to New Orleans over a three-month period.

In the mid-1840s, as a lawyer in Springfield, Ill., his law partner William Herndon recalled watching Lincoln working on a large boat model with a local craftsman. A Springfield resident recalled Lincoln demonstrating the idea for his model in public. His model embodies an idea Lincoln had for raising vessels over shoal waters by increasing their buoyancy. That idea became patent #6,469 in May 1849—the only patent ever obtained by an American president. After he became president in 1860 and moved to Washington, he visited his model in the nearby Patent Office at least once. He also enjoyed reviewing naval vessels and ideas, and he personally approved inventor John Ericsson’s idea for the ironclad warship Monitor.

Lincoln’s original patent model was acquired by the Smithsonian in 1908 and has left the Mall only once since then, for an exhibit at the US Patent Office. This replica was built by the Smithsonian in 1978 for long-term display to preserve the fragile original.

Carved from the teeth of captured sperm whales, whale stamps were used to record the type of whale and number of barrels of oil they yielded.

The stamps were inked onto the page of whaleship logbooks or sailors’ journals, with an empty space in the whale’s body for writing in the number of barrels. This example in the form of a sperm whale is decorated with steel pin heads and a turned handle.

Part of the navigator’s tool kit, parallel rules were used to transfer compass points, course lines and other directional information across large charts without change. This large wooden set has a carved ivory whale inlaid into its surface, with a brass tack for the whale’s eye.

Indiana's propeller was manufactured by Spang & Co. of Pittsburgh, PA, as stamped on one of the blades. This firm, a large iron manufacturing company centered in Pittsburgh, PA, was founded in 1828 and was one of the earliest and largest manufacturers of iron products in the United States.

The hub of the propeller is cast iron; the blades are rolled iron. One of the intact blades is chipped and dented, suggesting a collision. Another blade is missing outside the yellow line, which marks where a large section broke loose, probably from hitting an object in the water. This piece struck the Indiana's sternpost, literally “shivered her timbers,” and started the leak that sank the ship. The blade broke off completely when the ship struck the lakebed and was found at the wreck site, buried in the sand under the stern post. It is reproduced here in fiberglass.

The closest design is by Richard Loper of Philadelphia, who registered three propeller-related patents in 1844 and 1845 and licensed his ideas to shipbuilders Reany, Neafie & Co., also of Philadelphia. Contemporary accounts state that Loper’s design was the most popular in the Great Lakes region, and some Lakes propeller manufacturers even advertised his design as the “Philadelphia Wheel.”